Take a moment to think about what it would mean to schedule some grief time in your life. Doesn’t sound like fun, but as most adults know, meaningful time doesn’t usually fit such a strict definition. Meaningful sounds pretty great to me. So does connective, profound, cathartic, genuine, healing, releasing, revelatory, healthy, enlivening, enriching, and loving. These are all things I’ve felt and experienced because of regular expressions of my grief.

Scheduled grief can be weekly, monthly, seasonally, on designated anniversaries, all or some of those in different configurations, communally and solo. We all schedule time for things that are necessary and important to us: work, social activities, exercise, vacations, hobbies, intimacy, special occasions, etc. If the acknowledgment and expression of our grief is not important and meaningful to us, the culture at large stands no chance of prioritizing it. We give the meaningful people and practices in our lives our most precious gift: our time. And we owe it to ourselves to allow our grief to have a dedicated place in those practices that sustain us.

If you are newly in mourning, it may not be necessary to schedule grief time because the early weeks and months can be so emotionally overwhelming and time consuming. You may benefit from taking breaks from hard grieving, which can be especially exhausting. However, if expressing emotion is difficult for you, even in the beginning, then scheduled grief time could be helpful from the get-go.

Regularly scheduled grief doesn’t have to include weeping (although it certainly can and often does for some of us), nor does it mean allowing negative and overwhelming thoughts to cycle over and over until you’ve pushed yourself into a self-inflicted funk. It can look like allowing yourself some space and time to cry it out, preferably with an understanding grief partner or small group, giving voice to difficult stuff that happened or regrets or “second thoughts” about a loved one’s last days or an ending of some other sort. It can mean sharing stories, laughter, awe, meaning-making, and synchronicities with others who experienced the same ending or share a relationship with the same person, or someone you trust with your heart (a grief walker friend).

Just two days ago, I discovered that August 30th is National Grief Awareness Day. It was so named in 2014, seven months after my sister Christine died, to raise the collective consciousness about the needs (and benefits) of grieving people and the cultural imperative to support grievers (which is all of us) with understanding and compassion. In reading more about it, I found a post on social media from a somewhat well-known grief authority noting that of course we’re all aware of our grief and inviting readers to share what they wanted others to know about grief. The respondents shared some great insights. But I do disagree that we’re all aware of our grief. Talking about something and living in real awareness of it are the not same thing. I suspect that if we were all truly aware of our grief and conscious of how it impacts our choices and lives, the world would be quite different and our culture would look nothing like it does at present.

So although I missed the memo 10 years ago, having a designated day like this is a valuable tool with which to bridge our discussions and learning about an experience we all have, but don’t like to talk about. That said, it’s just one day, and as I have learned, regularly scheduled grief is the ongoing encounter with a fact of life, and a choice we make to care for ourselves and those we love, living and deceased.